Digital Publishing & Marketing Intensive
Next: July 24-26 | Boston, Massachusetts | Download the brochure for more information
Day 1 – Tuesday, July 24
| 8:30 AM | Registration |
| 9:00 AM | Meeting User Needs |
| 9:30 AM | Leveraging Digital Media Trends |
| 10:30 AM | Morning Break |
| 11:00 AM | Selling Digital Content |
| 12:30 PM | Luncheon |
| 1:30 PM | Selling Digital Advertising |
| 3:00 PM | Afternoon Break |
| 3:30 PM | SEO Keyword Research  |
| 5:00 PM | Day One Concludes |
| 5:30 PM | Networking Reception |
Day 2 – Wednesday, July 25
| 8:30 AM | Burning Questions Roundtable |
| 9:00 AM | Building Media Websites |
| 10:30 AM | Morning Break |
| 11:00AM | Attracting Website Visitors |
| 12:30 PM | Luncheon |
| 1:30 PM | Social Media Marketing |
| 3:00 PM | Afternoon Break |
| 3:30 PM | Digital App Marketing |
| 4:15 PM | Integrated Campaign Management |
| 5:00 PM | Day Two Concludes |
Day 3 – Thursday, July 26
| 8:30 AM | Burning Questions Roundtable |
| 9:00 AM | Understanding Google Analytics |
| 10:00 AM | Managing Key Metrics (Digital Publishing Scorecard) |
| 10:30 AM | Morning Break |
| 11:00 AM | Modeling The Future |
| 11:30 PM | Business Plan Development |
| 12:30 PM | Next Steps & Resources |
| 1:00 PM | Intensive Concludes |
Day One
9:00 AM | Meeting User Needs: Making Money on the Internet 101
We start with the fundamentals: How do you serve the needs of all your constituencies? Until you understand these basic strategies, you can’t profit from digital publishing, and you won’t understand the phenomenally successful Mequoda Method.
9:30 AM | Leveraging Digital Media Trends: Monetizing the Future
You’re facing the biggest sea change in publishing since Gutenberg. Nothing in our living history can tell you how to go forward in the digital age. But Mequoda has conducted its own proprietary survey of digital consumers, and we’ve discovered some secrets to their wants and needs that may surprise you. How do your readers consume digital content? What should your very next business move be?
Smaller niche publishers often wonder about the secrets to success for those who have led the way. Yet even the big players don’t always get it right. Sometimes the earliest leaders, driving without a map, have gotten themselves hopelessly lost! Find out which publishers are getting it right, and how you measure their success. You’ll get data directly from extremely successful niche publishers who you can use as mentor sites. You’ll take home specific examples of right and wrong, learn from others’ mistakes, and begin to see your own path forward.
11:00 AM | Selling Digital Content: Profit from Magazines, Books, Videos & other Premium Products
Welcome to success: This session delivers the strategies you need to make millions from all forms of digital content, including some you may not have considered yet. Find out exactly what drives revenues for a variety of business models from The Motley Fool and the American Ceramics Society to The Economist and America’s Test Kitchen, and begin to see how you can translate these strategies to make millions of your own.
We’ll also take you through a complete fictitious case study of a niche publisher who’s identified a host of new products to sell so you can see the options available to you. Plus you’ll discover new ideas for marketing channels and website infrastructure that maximizes sales and revenues for anyone with content to sell. You’ll leave this session with the knowledge you need to fine-tune your existing operation or plan ahead for your new online business.
1:30 PM | Selling Digital Advertising: 5 Strategies Publishers Are Using to Make Millions Online
Did you think that digital advertising is just about banner ads and impressions? Are you aware of the new profits to be made thanks to the tablet? This session is made for you! We’ve taken a deep dive into specific strategies, from Forbes and The New Yorker to Computerworld and Media Bistro, that have proved especially profitable for different business models – and some of them will be perfect for you. You’ll take home innovative new ideas plus a specific, detailed case study for our favorite advertising model, which you can implement even if you never thought you’d sell advertising.
If you have a legacy print publication, you’ll find out how to enhance profits with a digital publication. If you host live events, we’ll show you how to maximize advertising revenues from that business. We even deliver some revenue channels you may never have heard of! Advertising in the digital age is about to take off, and you’ll be on that train after this session.
3:30 PM | SEO Keyword Research: Step by Step
Effective keyword research represents the core of all organic marketing activities. It’s the fundamental skill every digital marketer and publisher must master in order to truly understand and capitalize on the search behaviors of their audience. Surprisingly, most publishers and their teams have no understanding of this skill whatsoever – thereby leaving tens of thousands of dollars lying on the table.
Learn the tips and tricks of the Google Keyword Tool, and how it’s used to gauge your audience’s information needs and map your website’s navigational taxonomy. Discover how to truly serve and build your audience, become a leader in your niche and generate more conversions through effective keyword research.
Bonus | Hands-On Workshop
You’ll be working in small groups to identify the keyword phrases we should be using in our fun, fictitious case study.
Day Two
8:30 AM | Burning Questions Roundtable
There are so many exciting new insights, so much detailed information, coming at you during the Intensive, that many of you come up with new questions long after each individual session is over. If you’ve slept on it and have burning questions for your instructors, bring ‘em to the Q&A sessions on Wednesday and Thursday mornings! We’ll give you our best solutions and share our secrets.
9:00 AM | Building Media Websites: Portals, Magazines & Stores
To grow and profit online, a multiplatform publisher must have a website that drives traffic, builds relationships, and sells subscription and information products. Achieving these goals is contingent on having a robust portal, an ecommerce store, and a subscription website. In this session, you’ll learn how to develop an efficient website strategy—one that enables you to build a better website in less time, and for less money.
Building a website is about more than just design, of course, and this session digs into the ways in which your entire infrastructure enhances whatever business model you’ve chosen, including driving traffic, converting visitors and selling products in multitudes. Using a proven framework as the backbone for your website’s architecture and functionality that Mequoda has implemented for respected publishers such as the American Ceramics Society, Black Belt, Biblical Archeology Society, Harvard University, Sunset, and Vida y Salud, you’ll take away tips for improving website usability and reducing time to market, and be ready to build your complete online world.
11:00 AM | Attracting Website Visitors: 29 Ways to Build your Online Audience & Email Circulation
Driving website traffic remains fundamental to every publisher’s success. Learn dozens of ways to drive traffic and leverage your website’s architecture to capture and build relationships, using the fundamentals of strategy, copywriting, website architecture and analytics.
In addition, now that social media has redefined the way people read and distribute online content, this session will also examine best practice examples of publishers who effectively use Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other niche sources to drive traffic, build relationships, and influence sales. You’ll get proven strategies for building your email subscriber file and cultivating a social media presence.
1:30 PM | Social Media Marketing: Using Content to Drive Website Traffic, Sales & Profits
Do you know how to properly leverage social media, or do you just have someone on your staff randomly post on Facebook and slap up tweets when the mood strikes?
Blogging and social media are at the heart of online marketing, but few publishers approach them with any kind of organized plan. We’ll discuss the data for monetizing blogs, posts, pins and tweets, including case studies from online publishing luminaries like Consumer Reports, Men’s Health, Black Belt and HR Daily Advisor. You’ll see how to use the content you already have as the basis for a social media campaign that uses repurposed long-form magazine articles into short-form blog and social media posts to build your audience and generate new sales.
Bonus | Hands-On Workshop
Put your online copywriting hats on! You’ll work in small groups to outline an SEO blogging campaign. Using the keyword research from Day 1, you’ll write an optimized blog post headline and lead paragraph, Twitter post and Facebook post promoting your online content.
3:30 PM | Digital App Marketing: Create Killer Sales Campaigns and Awesome Apps
At the heart of any online publishing empire is your digital magazine, journal or newsletter. So you’ve got lots of new traffic to your website … now, how do you convince your visitors and email subscribers to buy it? It all starts with the fundamentals of marketing – which haven’t changed, even in the digital age – and then leverages the consumer’s demand for tablet and smartphone apps to drive new subscriptions, higher prices and improved renewal rates.
In this session, you’ll learn how to craft your offers, price your products, deploy killer copywriting and leverage all of those things across multiple platforms. We’ll also surprise you with the news that magazine apps shouldn’t be games or gadgets, and they should offer plenty of free content and a satisfying user experience.
We’ll deliver real life case studies of successful apps and the data that proves their success. Then we’ll show you exactly how to make it work, using our fictitious case study and app map. In the end, you’ll be ready to master this new, uncharted marketing channel.
4:15 PM | Integrated Campaign Management: Master the New Marketing Channels for Big Profits
Do you want your business to make millions online? Then start by giving content away. That’s right: Blog posts, email newsletters, and social media are the key to selling your magazines, books, videos and events. And we can prove it: We deliver a real-world case study in which a small niche publisher used the Mequoda SEO Campaign Method to make millions of dollars from a single piece of free content.
You’ll learn each step from identifying blockbuster keywords, to converting visitors to community members and buyers, and finally to analyzing your results. Along the way you’ll even learn how to get your editorial team on board with your marketing efforts!
All in all, you’ll take home a complete campaign blueprint that you can implement to promote and sell your premium product in multitudes – starting immediately!
Day Three
8:30 AM | Burning Questions Roundtable
Bring your questions about the Day 2 material. No question goes unanswered!
9:00 AM | Understanding Google Analytics: Measuring What Matters
Some metrics are more important than others, and understanding their context is key—in fact, many site operators end up focusing on the wrong ones. In this session, we’ll start by clearing up common confusion over Google Analytics terms such as visits, page views and bounce. Then we’ll review key metrics, learn the deeper meaning behind them, and examine how to use them to your advantage.
Our analytics manager will show you how to use key performance indicators (KPIs) to make better resource, staffing, and content performance decisions, and how to use Google Analytics as a way to monitor the performance of your web and email activity, ecommerce systems, and SEO and link-building efforts.
10:00 AM | Managing Key Metrics: The Ultimate Publishing Scorecard
This workshop delivers a quantifiable methodology, or scorecard, for auditing your current market position. By analyzing scorecard data, you can identify high- and underperforming areas and accordingly, make better resource allocation decisions. Some publishers refer to this audit as the ultimate audience reporting tool, as it shows, at a very high level, the direct impact that marketing and resource decisions have on market share.
11:00 AM | Modeling the Future: Using Key Metrics to Create a Simple 5-Year Financial Forecast
Discover a simple yet comprehensive way to forecast the future of your digital publishing business. Discussing the handful of key metrics that can be used as “proxy” metric assumptions, we’ll simplify the process of modeling your digital business. Our model takes advantage of our years of experience with our many clients, delivering bulletproof assumptions that you’d pay thousands for from any consultant.
This session eliminates guessing as you forge ahead with your expansion into the digital space. At the end of it all, you’ll take home a complete master business model, including revenues, expenses and profits, which you can use to build a complete digital publishing organization.
11:30 AM | Business Plan Development: Making the Case for your Digital Marketing System
In this session, we share a time-tested business plan that has been used to successfully raise millions of dollars. You can use this business plan format to rally the troops, gain executive support, and when necessary, raise capital for your digital publishing business. Find out how to map out your new empire so everyone’s on board, discover which data is most important in your business planning, and find the funding to make it all happen.
Take home examples of PowerPoint slides that show your audience what your organization chart will look like. Sell them on your team members and content plan. Ensure understanding of the opportunity your business plan represents, and get everyone involved engaged, excited and on board.
12:30 PM |Next Steps & Resources:
We end the Intensive with a roundup of resources for charting your new path, from free white papers to our business plan development services.
